I started working with Fede e Luce forty years ago at my parish church, San Giuseppe della Pace in Milan, when I was sixteen. I turned fifty-six during the 2015 pilgrimage to Assisi, and my sisters made sure I was properly celebrated! They gave me the pilgrimage T-shirt signed by all the Milan groups — it's beautiful.
I had been to Assisi with Fede e Luce when I was about eighteen. What strikes me now is this: thanks to the young people with disabilities, the spirit is still alive. The movement has changed over time, but in its essence, not much has shifted.
Fede e Luce converted me. When I first joined, I had stopped going to Mass. At my high school, only members of a conservative Catholic group attended, and they were treated as outsiders. Meeting the young people with disabilities forced me to confront a question I'd been avoiding: what does suffering mean? Through Fede e Luce, I found spiritual guides who pointed me toward the Book of Job. That's where my faith journey began. Back then, we teenagers were told that even non-believers could participate in Fede e Luce — there was a joke going around that renamed the movement "Disbelief and Shadows." I left after I turned twenty (the camping trips to Maderno were the best part of it) to work on music education with disabled young people. After ten years, when my third child was born, I stepped back from that volunteer work to focus on my family and my career as a psychologist. I brought my children to the Fede e Luce San Giuseppe della Pace Christmas parties, and one summer we joined a camp at Saviore — which is why there's a photo in the Fede e Luce album showing my oldest daughter with one of the young people. Later, I began attending the group again occasionally with my parents. Every time, I left feeling calm and part of something larger — especially during the beautiful Passover dinners with the foot washing. In 1999, I discovered the Association Mondo di Comunità e Famiglia and started attending regularly. I've tried to orient my life increasingly around the values it represents: hospitality, simplicity, and sharing. These are the same values at the heart of Fede e Luce communities.
Over these forty years, I've seen more communities built on these principles emerge. Young people with disabilities now have real chances for integration and friendship that didn't exist before. Can we say clearly what makes Fede e Luce distinctive? I keep showing up — sporadically, but I keep coming back — because the bonds formed there are among the most meaningful in my life. I'm grateful to everyone who has kept this lamp burning, who tends it daily or nearly so. A heartfelt thank you.
Laura de Rino, 2015
===FINE===